Planewalker

Hey, while you're in there among the voice lines, would you be able to poke around and make a list of unused campaign lines? I hadn't thought about that and I should look into it further. I probably can fix that too.

Hey there, fellas. I've been quietly engineering something. If you are familiar with Stronghold Legends, then you're aware that the in-game music has some glitches. The battle music hardly ever plays outside of a campaign scenario. Even then, it often glitches and ends abruptly and starts a peacetime song after the first few seconds of the battle track. The map editor never switches over to peaceful music like it did in Stronghold 2, even though those tracks still exist in the system files. Some special tracks made specifically for SHL, like the beloved Thorns on a Rose which featured prominently in the demo, never play when they should. Certain tracks play too often, and some hardly ever, and the mood conveyed can feel somewhat random and out of sync with what's happening. I may have sufficiently figured out the music system well enough to solve (or at least mostly resolve) all of the above problems. Testing for it so far has been great, and I think I'd like to have some other people try it out. What's cool is that it *should* be an entirely localized patch, so it should run on any game mode, including in multiplayer, without file issues from different languages or the like.

Well that makes a lot more sense. I always felt like it was a bit off.

Fantastic news! I've been pleased with the castle editor, but there's no question that the UI feels very dated and can be hard to work with at times.

That's a wild outcome. Thanks for posting the end info.

The single biggest thing I agree with is how much people sleep on men-at-arms. I think people instinctively equate them to Spearmen from previous SH games too much. Arthur's ability to produce honor early on is also fantastic due to four granary food types plus a full lord's kitchen. I am also very impressed to find out that Gawain's shield protects you from Ice Queen and Ice Dragon. Does it also defend against Ice Mirrors?

Both were pretty bad, but the SH2 behavior was more often frustrating for the player. Map design could fix the AI issue by always putting iron and stone in relatively close proximity in an estate.

Fantastic. Glad to see this kind of work coming along after the recent editor improvements. :D

As some of you may have observed, I have occasionally done some delving into the inner workings of Stronghold Legends over the past couple of years. I know some of you, particularly @ Asophix and @ Lord_Chris are particularly experienced at SHL gameplay (especially in multiplayer). I would like some input from the more experienced members of the community about the flow of the game, things like: What's too weak/strong? What's the most common problem with skirmish maps or custom scenarios? What are noteworthy gameplay differences between singleplayer and multiplayer? If you had the opportunity to redesign SHL, what would you change, and why? In full disclosure, I am considering creating something like a standalone expansion mod which introduces new campaigns and a variety of improvements. I've had quite a lot of time to think about it (over 15 years). The discoveries made recently with modding tools like the AI editors may be a sign that it is time.

Man, I used to post on SHH a lot (as Lord_Tanthos at that time) when I was a teenager. I appreciate your preservation of it.

Now this is the kind of awesome potential I was thinking about. :D

Not only is this UI beautiful and on theme, but the additional warning helpers are super great for the user experience. I appreciate having so much insight into the AI's actions. The AI user patch being discussed in the other thread is probably a good pursuit.

Beautiful work, Asophix! I'll have to experiment with how big the castles can feasibly get before they introduce vulnerabilities like gaps in the defenses due to other buildings or terrain features. Have you experimented with large AI castles?

@ Asophix How has the castle building gone so far? Have you had the chance to do skirmish experiments? The main lesson I learned is that fire drakes on the outside walls are a great way to get the AI to burn down their own economy. Oops!

Hey everyone - Lord Tanthos here - an old-time Legends fanatic! Having recently explored the differences between granary food, I decided to examine royal food next. Background. The castle kitchen stores royal food: eels, pigs, wine, and vegetables. Each month, your lord may feast upon the following in exchange for honor: Half Feast: 1/month = 5 honor Normal Feast: 2/month = 8 honor Extra Feast: 4/month = 12 honor Double Feast: 8/month = 20 honor +1 honor per month for each extra food type eaten Note that vegetables are only available to Arthurian lords. I built a castle kitchen and placed two of each: pond, garden, vineyard, and pig farm adjacent to it. First, I noted delivery sizes: Eel Farmer: 4 eels Gardener: 5 vegetables Grape Farmer: 6 wine Pig Farmer: 2 pigs After 10 minutes, I had the following: 80 eels, 52 pigs, 36 wine, 50 vegetables There is a major output difference between these farms. A single eel farmer can nearly match the production of two other farmer types. I expected more from the grape farmers, given their large delivery size of 6. However, wine production is slow - the farmer takes a long time gardening, gathering, and pressing all the grapes grown on their farm. I repeated the same test (2 of each farm for 10 minutes), but placed the farms approximately 15 tiles further away from the kitchen. After 10 minutes, I had the following: 48 eels, 28 pigs, 24 wine, 30 vegetables Distance affected each of these substantially, but not equally. Eels and vegetables dropped by 40%, but pigs dropped by almost half, whereas wine only dropped by 33%. This is because pig farmers have the smallest delivery size and grape farmers have the largest, thus being most and least affected by walking time, respectively. Therefore, place pig farms closest to the kitchen and place vineyards further away. Now, most importantly, how many farmers does it take to maintain levels of feasting with good variety? First off, a single eel farmer adjacent to the kitchen is alone sufficient to maintain Normal feast consumption, providing 8 honor per month for a single peasant and a small amount of wood. One of each farm is sufficient to provide Extra feast consumption, but you'll occasionally run out of wine due to its slow production time (even more so if you're Ice or Evil, and thus have no vegetables to make up the difference). In most circumstances, it's best to always place at least two vineyards. If you want to have constant Double feast, place 1 pond, 2 gardens, 2 pig farms, and 3 vineyards. As it turns out, it doesn't take too much to get 20+ honor per month.